Book group

Our Monday Night Book Group just completed their study of Brideshead Revisited and will soon be beginning their next book Father Elijah: An Apocalypse. For more information on Father Elijah, check out the synopsis below.

fATHER ELIJAH: AN APOCALYPSE

Father Elijah is the tale of a Carmelite priest, Father Elijah (born David Schäfer), and his confrontation with the spirit of Antichrist. Set in Rome, Poland and Israel, the events of this novel take place approximately the same time as Eclipse of the Sun. (Ignatius Press, 1996)

Michael O'Brien presents a thrilling apocalyptic novel about the condition of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of time. It explores the state of the modern world, and the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary religious scene, by taking his central character, Father Elijah Schäfer, a Carmelite priest, on a secret mission for the Vatican which embroils him in a series of crises and subterfuges affecting the ultimate destiny of the Church.

Father Elijah is a convert from Judaism, a survivor of the Holocaust, a man once powerful in Israel. For twenty years he has been "buried in the dark night of Carmel" on the mountain of the prophet Elijah. The Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State call him out of obscurity and give him a task of the highest sensitivity: to penetrate into the inner circles of a man whom they believe may be the Antichrist. Their purpose: to call the Man of Sin to repentance, and thus to postpone the great tribulation long enough to preach the Gospel to the whole world.

In this richly textured tale, Father Elijah crosses Europe and the Middle East, moves through the echelons of world power, meets saints and sinners, presidents, judges, mystics, embattled Catholic journalists, faithful priests and a conspiracy of traitors within the very House of God. This is an apocalypse in the old literary sense, but one that was written in the light of Christian revelation.